I want to install new nvidia drivers R310 so I downloaded driver and when I run it it says that i can't install new drivers because there is this nouveau driver. It asked me if I want to add blacklist file with nouveau in modprobe so I said yes please. After reboot same thing, I searched through endless topics/questions/etc, i ran sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau and tried other things and still didn't find solution how to install new drivers.

I tried the following directions, and I am not prompted to remove the Nouveau driver.

To change to the recommended proprietary driver used by Ubuntu, do
the following:

Open Additional Drivers either through Systems Settings or by
clicking the Unity dash icon and entering "additional drivers".

From the list of available drivers, select the proprietary driver requested by Steam. Your current driver is indicated by a green
symbol. If the recommended driver is not listed, you will need to
update your package cache by clicking the Update button.

How does one do this from the command line? I'm in a state where I have no Unity and no chrome on windows, just a barebones Gnome environment (fortunately my global keyboard shortcuts to open terminals work).
–
KonkloneNov 8 '12 at 15:23

@Konklone : You need to run ` sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia*` followed by sudo apt-get install nvidia-current. Looks like you found a similar solution on your own.
–
Stefan LasiewskiNov 11 '12 at 5:39

Basically, install the linux-source and linux-headers-generic packages, then reinstall the nvidia-current-updates package (it worked for me just by providing the --reinstall flag, I didn't need to remove the package). Then reboot.

This will not work with older NVIDIA GPUs. I have a GeForce 5500 and the only fix was to install a legacy driver from the NVIDIA website.

I discovered this after looking at the syslog (log file viewer --> syslog) file which pointed me to the http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html site. The message will also tell you which NVIDIA driver you should download (in my case version 172.14.xx).